Word: friedkins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
CRUISING Directed and Written by William Friedkin...
...making Cruising, William Friedkin was asking for trouble. This detective melodrama has something to offend almost everyone: the plot concerns a string of sex murders, and the main setting is Manhattan's unsavory demimonde of sadomasochistic homosexual bars. Last summer, gay activists picketed Cruising's locations, charging that the film would stir anti-gay violence. Two weeks ago, a big theater chain threatened to cancel Cruising 's bookings on the grounds that the film merited an X rather than its official R rating. When the movie opens nationwide this week, more protests may follow. Certainly Cruising will...
...uproar justified? Not entirely. True, Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist) is up to his usual grisly tricks: the killings are gruesome, and the simulation of S-M couplings will appall many moviegoers of all sexual persuasions. Yet Cruising is not antigay, any more than a film like American Gigolo is anti-heterosexual. Friedkin repeatedly - even tediously-reminds the audience that the S-M crowd is but a small, atypical subculture within a diverse homosexual world...
...real problem with Cruising is Friedkin's inability to deliver what should have been a brilliant thriller about sex and death. This film muffles a potentially explosive premise. In order to trap a psychopathic murderer who preys on gays, Cop Steve Burns (Al Pacino) adopts a fictive homosexual identity and blends into the rough S-M scene. Gradually he zeroes in on the killer, but not without paying a weird price: Burns begins to lose his real-life grip on heterosexuality...
...movie's view, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Cruising's gay protesters notwithstanding, Friedkin in fact seems to be coming out in favor of androgyny...